We still need to make the electricity.
What percentage of non-carbon/renewable energy sources are going into my ICE next time I go to the pump?
https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix
This is all massively up from a decade ago. I wonder what percentage of non-carbon sources I'll have for my EV next decade. Do you think the non-carbon energy sources in my ICE will go down in a decade?
I'd argue the mix of non-carbon energy going into your car is a lot closer to 7.4% -- just the nuclear. Wind and solar both require industrial processes, materials, and maintenance involving not insignificant amounts of oil.
also: why are you charging your EV in the middle of the day in Texas, in the summer? ERCOT asks people to conserve energy; this guy charges his car. Maybe save your grid strain for the evening?
Play enough games and throw no real numbers around and you can argue everything isn't renewable then. Are you really arguing that the lubrication needed for a turbine makes its overall carbon impact the same as natural gas or oil?
Also, good job showing your ignorance of the Texas grid. ERCOT isn't asking people to conserve electricity at the moment buddy. Real-time spot prices are $24.65/MWh. We're nowhere near the committed capacity. There's lots of electricity available. Maybe save your comments for things you actually understand?
We'll be fine.
An electric car bought today that is powered by a coal plant today will be powered by solar/hydro/wind more and more each year.
A gas car will always run on fossil fuels.
Still, I’m not really seeing the evidence that the grid is getting all that much greener. There’s a lot of solar capacity installed and yet every year we use more fossil fuels than the year before. It dents the growth a bit but it doesn’t seem to be doing a good job at replacing fossil fuels.
We need more gen iv fission, not more renewables, to meaningfully displace fossil fuels. And no, it’s not more expensive than solar even today if you add the cost of batteries which everyone seems to ignore when comparing solar/wind to fission. As for hydro, that resource is fully tapped; all the available capacity is fully in use at a significant environmental cost. Geothermal might be a good one but it requires a massive shift in where cities are located which limits its utility (HVDC remains extremely expensive).
TL;DR if fast deployment of low carbon sources is what you want, nuclear definitely is not the answer.
Nuclear power needs a serious overhaul of the regulatory framework in the US and that starts with a broader swelling of support to overcome all the misinformed propaganda.
It's true that China is beating the rest of the world on nuclear construction. It is also unfortunately true that current-gen (non SMR) nuclear doesn't scale the way factory-built solar PV and wind tech does. Again reposting this very illustrative chart: https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-...
[1] "It peaked in 2018 with 7 reactors with a capacity of 8.2 GW. For the five years since then then it’s been averaging 2.3 GW of new nuclear capacity, and last year only added 1.2 GW between a new GW scale reactor and a 200 MW small modular nuclear reactor." https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/12/nuclear-continues-to-la...
> China's renewable capacity growth is yet to reflect in electricity supply, with coal still occupying nearly 60% of the country's generation mix
So basically China built a bunch of solar power plants that aren't connected to anything. Given how little transparency there is in China, it's entirely possible the plants were built because the country was generating way more solar panels than was useful globally & thus had to purchase it to prevent an absolute cratering in solar PV price.
https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...
Oh wait, https://www.economist.com/business/2024/06/17/chinas-giant-s....
> China's giant solar industry is in turmoil. Overcapacity has caused prices—and profits—to tumble
Non paywall, similar sentiment: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-blistering-so...
> The country's solar power expansion is slowing due to tighter curbs on supplying excess power from rooftop solar into the grid and changes in electricity pricing that are denting the economics of new solar projects.
It's really starting to look like 2023 was a fluke and solar projects are running into the headwinds everyone's been saying they will - no grid is set up to switch to solar and the more solar you install the more you destabilize the grid. And since panel prices have dropped so low because of global subsidies to rooftop solar, existing policies around rooftop solar turn into another headwind which slows down growth of grid solar & should see panel prices start to rise back up as people stop installing rooftop solar, pushing solar projects back out of profitability at either end.
In other words, we've kind of hit "peak solar" in the near term and the outlook for grid solar displacing fossil fuels is very cloudy.
You seem to be comforted by the idea that China isn't actually deploying renewables at the rate they are. It's a strange thing to be comforted by; in any case, I don't think it's a particularly good idea to become attached to.
No, I'm concerned that for all the amount of renewables they're deploying, almost none of it is getting connected to the grid and the amount of fossil fuel usage is unaffected by all this solar capacity they've installed. I'd love it if solar actually helped us get the grid to net 0 by 2050. The problem is that right now we're way off track to achieve that goal.
According to https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinas-battery-storage-ca..., China's expected to install less storage in 2024 not 2023:
> Growth in China's battery storage capacity could slow down in 2024, according to an industry association, as energy storage struggles with low profitability.
Confusingly other sources claim that they installed 10 GW in 2023 so it seems like for all of this concrete reliable numbers may be hard to obtain. Anyway, the point still stands - battery + renewables remains a pricing challenge vs fission and renewables alone cannot supplant the equivalent amount of fossil fuels in the grid due to how complex the grid is & gris are fundamentally not designed for intermittent sources like renewables & the more you install the more unstable & expensive it gets trying to stabilize it.
Thus my concern remains that solar has failed to demonstrate a power to actually displace fossil fuels within the grid reliably at scale whereas nuclear has a demonstrated track record of doing so consistently. I worry that deinvesting in nuclear in favor of renewables is going to continue to pour good money after bad and thus result in a prolonged decarbonization plan. It'll be the irony of ironies when we'll end up buying Chinese nuclear reactors so that we can actually decarbonize our grid.
You are offering this as a fact, but the fact is incorrect.
"Analysis: UK electricity from fossil fuels drops to lowest level since 1957": https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-electricity-from-fos...
"The CO2 footprint of the EU electricity grid was cut in half, from 501 grams of CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour in 1990 to 251 grams in 2022." https://eu.boell.org/en/2024/04/03/100-renewables-way-forwar...
"China’s Carbon Emissions Are Set to Decline Years Earlier Than Expected" https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-carbon-emissions-are-...
China in particular deployed about 217GW of (just) solar PV last year, and they're on track to meet or exceed that this year. https://www.pv-tech.org/chinas-installed-solar-capacity-660g...
Right now everything looks set for continued exponentially-shaped curves on renewables deployment, which will drive coal and eventually the majority of fossil generation out of the grid. None of that is happening in nuclear, unfortunately.
Yes, solar can supply a lot of daytime power as China has demonstrated. But all that daytime power generation is wasted for nighttime power needs. So overbuilding solar in that way will mean super cheap clean energy during the day and super expensive dirty energy at night (because that dirty energy will no longer have daytime demands). And the dirty power will be dirtier since it’s going to be plants that can spin up quickly instead of the baseload ones that are always on. Think about it logically - if solar was solving all their needs, why is China investing in turbocharging their nuclear industry? Answer: because baseload and a reliable backstop to the grid is super important and valuable and batteries won’t cut it to completely decarbonize the grid.
Renewables are popular because fossil fuel companies don’t find them objectionable - it’s a much gradual off ramp from fossil fuel dependence in the grid than with nuclear. And unlike nuclear, fossil fuels remain in use to handle low energy cases from renewables until batteries magically get good enough for the grid.
We need to figure out how to store and transport the electricity.
Now if only there were a way to bundle that energy storage with a means of transportation...
Fission is a much saner cost effective solution that requires much fewer ancillary changes than renewables would to fully move the grid.
And I've had solar companies in my portfolio for the last decade. They're a great investment.
As for solar companies stock prices doing great, how is that relevant at all?
You say you haven't because of onerous regulations and it's true, I associate France with a heavier regulatory burden than most Anglophone countries. If it's the coal lobby that killed Nuclear's profitability in the US, I have two questions:
1) why are you attacking renewables rather than the coal industry? If you think Nuclear could compete on an economic basis with renewables, surely you could make common cause with my side of this debate to properly price fossil energy's negative externalities and let the market sort out the winners once that's achieved.
2) Why not build a nuclear reactor in Mexico and export the power to the US? Or in any of the other low-regulation countries with a neighbor looking to import power? If it's regulations that make nuclear unprofitable, surely nuclear investors could regulation-shop.
2. There’s a few problems with your proposal. Mexico has even less experience than the US building nuclear power and gen IV reactor designs (which is what we should be building) are just exiting into real world plants. Also, Mexico isn’t a nuclear power and it’s permission to build nuclear power plants comes from the US and falls under the US regulatory framework anyway:
> Under the PSAs, each nuclear transaction from the United States to Mexico was an exceptional case to the legal requirements of the Atomic Energy Act. In addition, where the PSA nuclear cooperation required the explicit consent of the IAEA, as well as Washington D.C. and Mexico City
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
I’m not aware of any other low-regulation countries near the US - are you? As for regulation shopping in Europe, again the same problem. The US has exported its nuclear regulatory framework to many Western countries. France is about the only one that managed to evade it and generates a surplus of energy (with no nuclear accidents by the way) that it then exports to its neighbors. This isn’t something nuclear investors can fix - it needs a top-down shift in nuclear policy and pushing politicians in Washington to fix the regulatory requirements. The US used to have the most forward nuclear industry until they killed it in the 80s and it’s taken 40 years for China to buck the worldwide regulations that the US has been using to lock things down due to their concerns about proliferation weakening their advantage they’ve had on force projection.